Professor Toro: Facebook favors faux newspaper look

CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week compared the sleek new look of the social networking site's main News Feed to a newspaper's front page.

The Professor was happy enough that Internet types thought her medium of choice maybe had something going for it all along. But then she got a look at the newspaper Zuckerberg used as a prop to get his point across, and she raised her horns to Mount Toro heights in pride.

The Monterey Daily, with a generous (and enviable) 60-some pages of content, featured headlines about the aquarium, trees and zoning laws and the Big Sur International Marathon.

The Daily's knowledge of local issues apparently doesn't extend to what the city actually looks like, though: The main image seems to be of a San Francisco streetscape, and a rather bleak one at that. Nor does the paper reflect the far more flattering layout of The Professor's favorite morning read.

But she appreciates the shout-out.

Steinbeck nixes Nixon tome

The Professor confesses magazines are stacked high on her bedstand. But she's still shaking her head over an Oct. 12, 2012, piece in the New York Times Book Review that revealed something surprising about Salinas-born novelist John Steinbeck.

The acclaimed author, a great admirer of Democrat Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, was approached by party operatives before the 1960 presidential conventions who wanted Steinbeck to write a novel that would bruise likely Republican nominee Richard Nixon.

Jim Arndorfer, author of the essay, points out there was a time in our history, strangely enough, when a novel could carry serious political weight.

In the end, Steinbeck declined the offer, saying taking on Nixon called for "kidney punches" rather than lampoons or satires.

Too bad — a Steinbeck novel about a Nixonian character would have been interesting. Sen. John F. Kennedy beat Stevenson at the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles and went on to defeat Nixon.

And the literary world was forever denied the pleasures of reading, say, "The Red-Baiting Phony" or "The November of Our Discontent."